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19 Sep, 14 tweets, 3 min read
I think making Facebook the villain, while always fun, takes us past the foundational problem here. Why people are so ready to be radicalized, including into some nonsensical directions like flat earthism, is a bigger question than can fit into a scheme of heroes and villains.
Part of the answer lies in a radical distrust of existing institutions, which if not born in 2008 certainly crystallized then. Another part of the answer has to do with how social media gives every subculture global reach. Another is in the architecture of persuasion and virality
Most of these are questions of human nature—we are a social species whose biology and culture is set up for life in small and gossipy local groups. Taking the "local" and "small" out of that equation has been a great social experiment enabled by the internet. It's not going well
But to blame Facebook for it also misses the point, because it conflates the company's very real faults with the structural problems of how to live in an interconnected world. This search for villains and scapegoats is a symptom of the very dynamic we're trying to get a handle on
And the people doing the research on this problem are mostly the elites who are so deeply distrusted by the kind of people who find comfort in belief systems like cryptocurrency or QAnon. This gives the whole project a paternalistic and authoritarian air.
As people like @alexstamos have rightly pointed out, this whole cauldron of outrage creates powerful disincentives for the social media giants—the only ones who have the data—to study what is going on. You don't have to worry about subpoenas for research you never conducted.
For people who don't know my work, I've been beating on Facebook like a piñata ever since I was on MySpace. it brings me comfort and happiness. But I also think we need to find a way to step out of the social media thunderdome and find a way to understand and fix this dynamic.
I also think that whatever approach we take from that can't be limited to academics, lawyers, and the various former tech executives who saw the error of their ways and have become the most prominent voices in this field. We can't NPR or social justice our way out of this problem
But the direction this project is going now is to create technical, legal and regulatory tools for power elites to suppress public speech that they find ideologically harmful. And at the same time, they express dismay that alienated people continue to flock to alternate realities
We need some fresh thinking on how to incorporate communication technologies into our social lives in a way that doesn't incentivize anger, radicalize the vulnerable, and turn every issue into tribal war. Nerdesse oblige on the part of the current players is not going to cut it.
And finally, we have to take this discussion out of the American cultural context these companies marinate in. You can't localize the dynamics of social media the way you would translate a web page, by doing an American version first and then tweaking it a bit for the foreigners
A lot of people have been comparing Facebook to big tobacco, but in my view the better metaphor for social media is alcohol. Unrestricted it's a disaster, but most of the work of keeping it in check is done by social norms, and differs across cultures. Some do better than others.
While we wait, though, letting a bunch of pasty nerds continue to run this apparatus of influence for profit is no bueno. Let's at least demonetize it (by cutting away at the taproot of surveillance and data collection) while we figure out how to live with it long term.
All that said about the futility of prescriptive content policing, I still believe people should do thirty years without parole for posting any recipe that doesn't start with the ingredient list and continue immediately with a straightforward description of how to make the dish.

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More from @Pinboard

21 Sep
Google's FEC filing is in, and as always full of interest. On August 21, the company made a $1000 donation to Iowa rep Mariannette Miller-Meeks. Less than a month later, Miller-Meeks was here on Twitter spreading disinformation on vaccine policy (despite being a medical doctor) ImageImage
The National Right to Life Committee gave West Virginia congressman David McKinley a 100% rating on abortion issues from 2011 to the present, and Google gave his campaign $2,500 on August 13. Image
On August 13, Google made a $5,000 donation to Abraham Lincoln PAC, twenty of whose 2020 recipients voted to overturn the results of the presidential election. Image
Read 8 tweets
21 Sep
Here's more information for the White House: the guy on the right works for Biden, and the men on the left are refugees Biden is deporting under fast-track public health authority he inherited from Trump that denies them a chance to file an asylum claim. cnn.com/2021/09/20/pol…
The pretense where Biden and his government are repeatedly shocked, shocked at the uncomfortable imagery of their policy decisions at the southern border or in evacuating visa applicants from Afghanistan adds insult to injury. At least Trump stood up for his nativist xenophobia.
Perhaps on Biden's watch we'll get a push to make sure more women and agents of color are whipping Haitians on horseback. But the substance of this Administration's attitude towards migrants, refugees, and undocumented Americans is pure MAGA.
Read 4 tweets
20 Sep
When you see the enormous political advantages of maintaining Trump's nativist immigration policies, but want none of the blame
The decision to obey the parliamentarian's rulings is a political decision made by the party in power. On the southern border, in Afghanistan, and now in the Senate, Democrats have shown us for the better part of a year how they feel about immigration. It's time to face the truth
Sorry, parliamentarian ruled I have to drink all your beer
Read 12 tweets
19 Sep
For years now, nuclear fusion has been 50 years away from being a viable power source. But recent fundamental advances in engineering reactors mean that we are now only 30 years away. Some of the younger people reading this tweet may even live to see the number brought down to 20
Every day the sun mocks us with rays of free, almost limitless power derived from a process that our best minds can't copy down here on earth despite having oceans full of fuel. Having to capture that power with solar panels is almost a slap in the face.
My favorite solar factoid is that the Sun's core, where nuclear fusion takes place, has the same power density as reptile metabolism. Just a big ball of gator meat up there in the sky, mocking our inability to fuse atoms, giving us freckles.
Read 6 tweets
19 Sep
59% of electric power in America comes from coal and natural gas, and there are years-long waiting lists for components like large transformers. This couldn't even be done in three years if there was political unanimity and a Great Leap Forward style crash program around it.
I get that it's just senile dementia, but that's also a problem!
What's important is that Biden's goal of achieving a carbon-free power grid by 2025 not interfere with Mark Zuckerberg's important work eradicating all disease in his children's lifetime
Read 4 tweets
18 Sep
I like roving as much as the next guy, but isn't Mars a little roved out by now? Let's rove it up a notch and go check out the places in the Solar System most likely to have life.
A human being wearing a pair of plastic wings can fly on Titan. The fact that Mars remains the idée fixe of our aging plutocrats speaks not to their vision, but to the paucity of their imagination.
There's already a bunch of places we know might sustain life, and on top of that are whatever undiscovered unknown unknowns we have yet to find. All we know about Neptune and Uranus is what we learned from sending a single digital camera built in 1977. Put rockets on an iPhone!
Read 4 tweets

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